Football : Mission Accomplished

We ran our socks off, we talked and chattered, and despite being a man short in the second half and having to field a player who could barely walk in the second we turned in a much better performance than on Tuesday. It may have been 13 - 0 but I don't care, and neither did anyone else. We played better, we could all see the progress and morale is good. Our attitude and effort even impressed our opponents - so hats off to Linacre college, they played well, they kept it fair and they did their job. Good stuff all round.

Said slips in the rankings, I couldn't care less

The FT rankings came out today and we've slipped to fourth in the UK, 35th in the world. Am I bothered? Not really, most of the UK schools slipped down the rankings, of the top school all were audited this year and lets be clear, these tables are not much more than vague indicators. Sure the schools at the top are good, but what for? The survey ranks employment prospects and average salary which skews everything toward financial based schools who churn out city traders. Then there's the question of entrepreneurs, as more and more of SBS alumni decide to start companies its hardly surprising that our average earnings figures take a knock.

The real influence is the involvement of recruiters and students in these surveys. SBS is a new school and teething problems are inevitable, likewise as the economy suffers on campus recruiters have been focusing on the big schools - that's my best guess. The real point, as I've said many times before is that my future job depends not on the school, but on me. So all in all the fact that I missed todays interview training to play football will probably have a bigger impact on my future career than anything the FT comes up with.

Marketing Preparation

Marketing Management is being taught by case study. Not in the kind of here's a lecture, now discuss the case study kind of way, but in the 100% of your mark depends on your performance in 21 submitted case studies. No case study submission may be more than a single typed side of A4 and lectures will consist of discussions of the work you've just handed in kind of way.

Three thoughts on this. First, its going to be tough for a lot of people. Secondly, a lot of people are going to learn a lot more about marketing than they would have any other way. Finally, you really really really don't want to find yourself resitting this one. I've read, done and thought about marketing a lot in the last few years. I've just done the first case study, wrote down a bunch of ideas, threw out the ones I thought looked mediocre and still ran out of space. I think I'm going to like this.

Still dreaming

There's a lot of thinking going on in the dreaming spires. This morning we had a talk on technology transfer at Oxford, the folks looking after this are Isis Innovation, and in the past six years they've spun out 34 companies - none of which have failed. More impressive was the £208 million Oxford gets through supporting its 4500 researchers every year.

I didn't know you could get that angry

That's what the captain of the football team said after our 15 - 0 (sadly we weren't playing rugby) thrashing at the hands of St Anthony's college. Odd thing is I didn't think I got nearly angry enough. If I hadn't been playing with the kind of hangover that made running difficult I might have been more use, screamed at the back four earlier and just maybe we'd have learned to push out in a straight line before the eighty minute mark...

Oh, and it would have been nice if eleven players had turned out for us, saving us from asking the lads on the pitch before us if anyone fancied a game...

Still, much credit for one of the best half time team talks I've heard "It doesn't matter if they score twenty, we've only got one thing to do and that's score a goal this half" which brought about ten minutes of confident, aggressive attacking football, hassle and running. If we'd scored then we might have kept it going, but we didn't and well that was that.

The problem is still communication. Football pitches should be noisy places filled with shouts of "man on", "push up", "I'll have", "so and so wants" and the rest. Perhaps its because so many of us are playing in foreign languages, perhaps its because so many of us haven't played for so long. In some cases players feel they can't tell better players what to do (not a problem I've ever had, being the gobbiest awful player I know). I don't know, but there are a few things we can work on and get right. We can work harder than our opponents, and we can talk more. If we get stuffed twenty nil on Satuday I won't care - so long as we work our socks off and keep talking.

Of course, as every schoolboy of my generation knows what we really need is a charismatic geordie manager, a former england international who was forced out of the game prematurely by injury. Do you know who it is yet? (256kb download)

Learning to upload

On arriving here in Oxford I found that for some reason I hadn't got my ftp client set up right and so couldn't make changes to anything other than the front page of the site. I resolved to fix this at some stage, and promptly forgot all about it as I drowned in work.

I've just downloaded CyD FTP Client and things seem to be progressing much better, in that I can see directories and move files. So things you've got to look forward to in the next few days include

• My revision notes
  
• Write ups of each course completed
  
• Previews of this terms courses
  
• Some general housekeeping on the out of date areas of the site
  

I'm also planning to upgrade to blogger pro which should make things a little more interactive around here, allowing you to pillory me for my poor spelling, lack of apostrophes, understanding and ability to run a decent blog. It may also let those of you wondering about doing an MBA ask some questions - which would be nice.

Learning to talk

I was fairly harsh on the company doing our speaker training after their last session which was a three hour presentation about giving presentations (containing the advice to keep things short). So it was with some trepidation that most of us turned up for the followup sessions, small group presentation workshops. These however turned out to be much better and pretty much everyone said they found them useful.

I need to learn to stand still (or at least not stand there doing a soft shoe shuffle) when presenting, other than that I've still got it ;-)